why linux is doomed

English Open Chat
1

yes, i know, the thread title is a troll.

my first exposure to unix was in 1980, using bsd 2.x on a vax 11/780. through the years, i have used many different bsd variations, as well as apollo, sun, and hp implementations. i have also used the pyramid OS which tried to join the bsd world with the att world.

tonight, i have had the worst experience with unix that is possible.

my current contract has me in an environment which uses novell netware, therefore my linux of choice is SUSE… which has become openSUSE. my office machine is an AMD based machine, but i like to try any changes on my home machine first. my home machine is a PPC based apple “quicksilver”, a not uncommon box. i was able to successfully install openSUSE 11.0 on that box using a net-install CD boot disk. this worked for a few months, and gave me the confidence to install the x86_64 version of openSUSE 11.0 on my office machine.

recently, openSUSE 11.1 was released. as my office version of 11.0 was incapable of installing openOffice.oo version 3 (god knows why), i thought that 11.1 might help. in order to investigate this, i believed that updating my home 11.0 installation to 11.1 would be a good idea.

so, i downloaded the net-install version of 11.1 (the dvd was unusable, because my quicksilver only has a cd drive). the download, burn, boot was un-eventful.

problem one… the update install decided that i had the wrong version of some “opensuse” config file. could i fix that??? of course not. all i could do was decide that the existing file was bad, and use the new one.

making that decision allowed me to continue through the install… all 5.5GB of downloads to update from 11.0 to 11.1.

after wasting that bandwidth, the installer decides to inform me that it cannot create the kernel. what? i have let my machine download nearly 6GB of updates, and suddenly i have no available kernel??? isn’t that something that should be worked out at the beginning?

so, i have now wasted an entire day, and over 5GB of my download quota to completely kill a working machine.

and, at this point, i have no recourse at all. if this computer was my only machine, i would be bereft of any computing capability.

how can an install fail at the last item? and if it fails, how can it be so catastrophic as to leave my hardware un-bootable?

apologists need not respond to this post. openSUSE has failed dramatically, and has soured any good feelings i have had for this distribution.

if an update leaves my machine in an unbootable state (which is what has now happened), then this update/release was not competently tested.

a re-install using 11.1 should not be necessary. if an update is not possible, that should be identified much earlier than the waste of 5GB of quota.

thanks, but no thanks. i will not appear here again.

2

I think you are over reacting you are trying to install a new OS on an old machine.
I wonder what it would be like if you tried installing the latest mac OS???

/Geoff

3

Sorry to hear you had problems. I hope you at least have enjoyed your rant. Simply speaking the in-situ upgrade version feature is rather new in OpenSUSE, it only appeared in 11.0, and cannot be expected to work well in these early days. It is simply not at the maturity level of the Debian or Ubuntu in-situ upgrade feature. If you had asked for advice here before doing your in-situ upgrade, you would have been warned off it. Most people do a backup and fresh install, although an offline upgrade also works. You could have used the NET CD to do an offline upgrade over NFS for example.

4

Which in turn fail too occasionally, even if only for the fact that you can’t control all combinations.

Since the OP “will not appear here again” I’ll leave my advice to passers-by. Prior to doing a system update on a working machine try the new software in a different partition if you care about any problem that could emerge and you see you are unable to solve it beforehand. If that’s not possible ask yourself twice if you really need to update or consider other ways (new install keeping /home, e.g.).

If your openSUSE is “incapable of installing openOffice.oo version X” ask in the forums, it might be a problem with an easy solution.

If your machine is a PPC you should know those are not the systems with the highest level of support, basically because not all of us have one. So get informed of possible problems prior to fiddling with it.

5

And of course. If you had asked here in the first place, you would have learned that to install OOffice 3 on openSUSE11.0 is very simple.

If you don’t take time to learn the ropes before climbing the ladder, don’t be surprised when you fall off.

6

I guess you are also arguing that windows is doomed because you can’t upgrade xp to vista. End of story.

7

How much are they paying for you to lie on Google indexed pages by the way?

8

JopSway wrote:

>
> ken_yap;1936524 Wrote:
>> It is simply not at the maturity level of the Debian or Ubuntu in-situ
>> upgrade feature.
>
> Which in turn fail too occasionally, even if only for the fact that you
> can’t control all combinations.
>
> Since the OP “will not appear here again” I’ll leave my advice to
> passers-by. Prior to doing a system update on a working machine try the
> new software in a different partition if you care about any problem that
> could emerge and you see you are unable to solve it beforehand. If
> that’s not possible ask yourself twice if you really need to update or
> consider other ways (new install keeping /home, e.g.).

That’s what I always do but that can still land you in trouble. I installed
4.1 on a fresh partition, found it was quite pretty but not up to scratch.
After switching back to 3.5, I got a bit tired of forgetting to monitor
re-boots and ending back in 4.1.

I then used the boot sequencer in YAST in 4.1 to change the order of
booting - plus removing a couple of dummy Windows partitions from the
sequence - and then I rebooted. It failed - “please press a key to
restart”.

I went in to the installation section from the DVD on reboot and used
the “repair system” in the hope that, for once, it might work. It detected
the boot problem and repaired it. This was progress as previous releases of
SUSE could never fix it. I then rebooted and - “please press a key to
restart”.

I had to re-install 4.1 again and put up with the out-of-order boot
sequence.

>
> If your openSUSE is “incapable of installing openOffice.oo version X”
> ask in the forums, it might be a problem with an easy solution.

Yes, that’s a result of a half-baked upgrade to 3.0.1 in the SUSE
repositories. I had to un-install OOo and then install only the items that
had been updated to 3.0.1.

–
Graham P Davis, Bracknell, Berks., UK. E-mail: newsman not newsboy

9

There are two ways to do this. So let me expand on what you’re saying here.

The first and best option is to have a /home partition and a / partition, and format / and install a fresh clean system. This poses the least amount of problems.

The second is to do an upgrade. This poses the most danger. To do this, you should have the equivalent of every repo you previously had, but for the version you are upgrading to. You also have to have a masterful understanding of dependencies. If you don’t have a masterful understanding of dependencies, don’t try and upgrade. You will run into issues.

I find that the OP, failed to take the precautionary steps to ensure a good upgrade. Just cause he tried it at home, does not ensure it’ll work on his works computer. Besides, he could have gone in with YaST and gotten the kernel, even after his system was borked.

As JopSway pointed out, PPC have limited support. In fact, PPC is fading into computing history.While Linux does still offer packages to support that architechture, that doesn’t mean that a lot of the community knows PPC. This is where doing the proper research ahead of time is benificial.

10

tonight, i have had the worst experience with unix that is possible.

Excuse me, but I fear you are making a logical fallacy. You have had the worst experience with unix that is possible (which is in fact, not true) so linux is doomed? Who are you? The whole world? You have a problem on your computer with your linux installation, and therefore linux itself is doomed?

Funny that this is your first post here. Why didn’t you come asking for help before you had this problem? Why come here after the damage has been done and you’re obviously not interested in discussion or getting help?

…as my office version of 11.0 was incapable of installing openOffice.oo version 3 (god knows why),

He certainly does know, and so does almost every other minorly experienced linuxer. You certainly can install ooo3 on 11.0, and if you had simply posted the question here, you’d probably have been up and running within hours.

But have it your way. And have a lot of fun.

11

This surprises me, you could upgrade with YaST in SuSE 6.1, 7.1-8.2, and the same method was present with 10.3 and 11.1. I think the OP was using the YaST upgrade with the Net Install CD, not trying to do anything new like zypper dup on a live system.

In old days, an upgrade was well covered by Release Notes, often it had caveats, which made a fresh install more desirable to enable new features. Now I’m starting to think, that as a community distro, we should plan to upgrade ‘safely’ or test; disks are big enough these days to make it feasible. That means having a spare / partition for tests, and seperate /home and data areas. And a way to easily rsync over the data, re-applying needed modifications to fstab and menu.lst.

Telling ppl to back up their systems, before doing risky changes isn’t working!

12

I consider myself about a 10-year-newbie. I have to check to believe in the wisdom and goodness of accepting default suggestions in upgrades and installs.

It seems to me, reading this forum and others, that the people that have the most serious problems are not the newbies. :stuck_out_tongue: There seems to be an inverse relationship between computer knowledge and success with upgrades and installs. No… make that a perverse relationship! >:)

13

Blame the distro for his failure. Tsk, tsk.tsk. That’s a sad experience.

14

If I’d done that testing 11.1 I’d have lost all my previous installs!

15

That’s why I qualified upgrade with the adjective in-situ. SUSE has for a long time offered upgrades by booting off the install media, but this involves downtime, and perhaps some reconciliation afterwards. People would like to be able to upgrade versions on a live system. zypper dup is fairly new. In fact there was no zypper before 11.0 or 10.3. It is possible some old releases had in-situ upgrade but that was before broadband was widespread and it was a different ball game then. Then for a long time, only offline upgrade was considered safe. There may have been an upgrade system icon in YaST but it was not the recommended method, the recommended method was to upgrade with the install media. So in effect zypper dup must be considered a new feature.

Running an offline upgrade from the NET CD is no different from an offline upgrade using the DVD.

16

Oh yes thats what i mean too!!
Shame on this user! And what is this for a argument…he use a old apple machine and wonders about no support…maybe he should tip S.u.S.E in wikipedia and look what it stays for…
…i m sure that “museum for archeologig apple hardware” will not comes out…

…end of the story!:sarcastic:

17

why do you not distinguish between operative system and distro? you make yourself look as if you’re savvier…

18

if he’s not appearing on here again,why did he even bother to write all this??

19

it’s called trolling :wink:

20

couldn’t agree more rotfl!